8 mar. 2006

"Ah de la vida." Nadie me responde....

"Ah de la casa" is what you would say if you you wanted to see if anyone was home. Something you shout out when entering a house. So "Ah de la vida" is saying: "anyone there? life?" Quevedo use of language is thoroughly "modern."

I should have been a scholar of 17th-century Spanish poetry. Somehow I got hung up on the bloody twentieth.

"presentes sucesiones de difuntos" --that's an interesting conception of human life: a sequence of successive individual present moments, each of which is inhabited by a different dead man, a "difunto."

***

Interesting in William Carlos Williams' essay on Lorca (this from '39): that Williams presents Lorca in terms of Spanish literary traditions, in a quite erudite way. The struggle and dialectic between popular and "culto" traditions. WCW brings in the Poema del Mío Cid, the romancero, baroque poetry, etc... but doesn't spend as much time on flamenco or gypsy traditions. Williams was condescended to for years by people vastly inferior to him in critical acumen. He was translating from the Spanish long before the boom in translations of the 60s. He knew of Neruda and Parra, Lorca, and the traditional Spanish cancionero.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."